Currently Speaking: Ritual, Repetition, and Transformation

The Current welcomes Christal Brown, choreographer, educator, and founder of INSPIRIT and Project: BECOMING, for a conversation exploring ritual, repetition, transformation, and the power of collective witnessing in performance.

What happens when repeated actions become ritual? How does ritual transform both performer and audience? And what role does collective witnessing play in the experience of performance? In dialogue with Miles Greenberg’s solo exhibition at The Current, Brown will consider the ways both artists engage duration, repetition, and the body to create experiences that move audiences beyond passive spectatorship.

Brown’s multidisciplinary practice combines movement, music, athleticism, and storytelling to explore change and transformation. She is the Founder of INSPIRIT, Project: BECOMING, the creator of the Liquid Strength training module for dance. Brown has served as the Chair of Dance at Middlebury College, the Twilight Artist in Residence and Chair of the Anti-Racist Taskforce.  Brown is a native of Kinston, North Carolina, where she remembers cleaning up on Saturday mornings as a child to the music of the Chi-Lites, Marvin Gaye, and Shirley Caesar. These rituals innately produced a strong desire in her to make all work melodic, sensual, meaningful and set to music.  Brown has danced since she was released from the confines of piano lessons at age 9.  By navigating her way through narrow corridors of segregated understandings onto the stages of beautiful theaters, community centers, churches, classrooms, and cultural epiphanies, Brown has found the true meaning of grace. Her path of self- discovery has been influenced by trailblazers such as Chuck Davis, Bill T. Jones, Andrea E. Woods, Liz Lerman, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.  Through these conduits of movement matter she was given the opportunity, permission, and responsibility to move and move others.  She is a mover, a warrior of change and transformation, living out experiences her double amputee father recounted from his war-ridden dreams.  The melodies in her body are melancholic and brought to life through the music; seen rather than heard through her choreography. Brown combines her athleticism, creativity, love for people, and passion for teaching to create works that redefine the art of dance and the structure of the field.  For more information visit inspiritdance.com or stepsandstagescoaching.com 

All Currently Speaking events are free and open to the public.